As many of you know, we recently released a new document viewer with annotation tools. Our aim was to free ourselves from the chains of third party restrictions that wouldn’t let us respond to your annotation-related feature requests. With this new tool, we will have the opportunity to do some of these requests that you’ve been asking for.

But before we start down the path of new annotation features, we need to respond to the feedback you’ve given us since we released the new DocViewer. And oh my, are we ever grateful for your input! We are always made better by collaborating with our community. So thank you, thank you, thank you for your comments, your feature ideas, for talking to your CSM and for contacting our support team with your feedback and concerns. Our top priority right now is to address the things we’ve heard most frequently from you. Below is what we’re working on right now. And yes, these are in a specific order. They are in the order of how much feedback we’ve heard on each of these topics.

Comment Size: We will make it easier to have as many comments as you need on one page. We’ll make it easier to see replies to comments and all the comments will stay on the page they are associated with. Done 9/15/17.

We've improved this experience significantly, but we'll keep refining to make comments display even better.

An additional change was made 10/18/17 to collapse and expand comments.

Download annotated PDF: This is a must! We are working fervently to make sure all users can download annotated documents quickly and easily. Partially done 7/19/17: We have just released the ability to download documents with annotations and comments, but will need to wait for a bit more work to be done to get all of the replies to comments to also be downloaded.

DocViewer Sessions: We are going to extend the life of your working session, give you lots of warnings when you approach the end of a single session and automatically refresh your session if you try to use annotations after your session has expired. Done 8/9/17.

Free Text tool, difficult to deleteand move: We’re working on making it much easier to move Free Text annotations that you’ve made, and will be making it easier to delete this and all other annotation types. Done 7/31/17.

Bonus: We're working on a way to move the annotation when it doesn't have text yet; right now you have to add text to the annotation before you can move it.

Full Screen Preview: You all gave us great screenshots and stories to illustrate the pain of the document not stretching to the full height of the document. We hear you, and we are working to make sure the document can be previewed easily.Done 7/17/17. Bonus: we're also working on a way to expand inline, so that the whole document can be seen in the context of an RCE in a course, without taking over the entire screen.

Hyperlinks in documents: We will make sure that the documents we present in DocViewer retain their hyperlinks. Done 7/17/17.

Free Text Background and Font Size: We are working on a way to change the font size and offer the choice of a transparent background or a white background for Free Text annotations. Done 01/23/18

Anonymize Annotation setting: Anonymous Annotations for the Graders is likely to be added as a SpeedGrader setting for each assignment. It will allow all annotations to be made without a reference to the grader who made them. Please note that Assignment Comments will still be attributed to graders, but all annotations and annotation comments will be anonymous.

Annotation Attribution and Trash Can: Our plan is to continue to give you the Annotation Attribution (the name of the person who made the annotation) if it wasn’t you. And we’ll give you a trash can on the annotations you made, so that you can delete them. But neither of these things will appear unless you’ve clicked directly on the annotation. Done 10/18/17.

We will continue to update the list above with planned releases of these features and with any new consensus feedback we hear from you. Please note, this isn’t the finite list of things we’re working on for DocViewer, but it’s the priority list we feel you have created with your collective voice. So please continue to send us your feedback and we will continue down the path towards making this the best Annotation tool on the market!

As always, the best way to receive updates about these behaviors (and less significant ones that may not be mentioned here) is to submit a support case to our Canvas support team. You'll receive a direct update as soon as one is available.

This is much more hopeful: this looks like a good set of priorities. How long do you think it will take to implement most of these?

On point no 7 (free text), please reduce the border to an absolute minimum; otherwise it's very hard to place additional annotations near to previous ones. When students are making frequent mistakes we have to place lots of annotations very close together. The current margin round the actual text is huge!

Thanks for the feedback Marcus. We are working to ensure that you can get LOTS of comments and annotations on every page. Totally appreciate your feedback on the border.

As to your question about when these things might be implemented. We're working on these things now and you will see some of these improvements very, very shortly. Others will take a bit more time, but we promise to be making incremental improvements as frequently as humanly possible. Stay tuned to this page, and I'll keep you all up to date whenever we release improvements.

Very pleasantly surprised to see the #6 and #5 got taken care of ahead of some of the weightier issues I've been observing on the community site. Selfishly, I had #6 as my preferred fix since I don't assess compositions in Speedgrader as much as some other instructors.

I am really happy to see the "Anonymize Annotation" setting on this plan! Until there is a good way to Hide Names of Graders (aka Anonymous graders) in Canvas, our faculty have been relying on the un-identified free-text annotations in Crocodoc to accomplish this when need. And the loss of this functionality with DocViewer was disappointing. Thanks!

Our engineers are aware of some slower performance with specific document rendering. If you are experiencing this and have an example where DocViewer is rendering slowly, please submit it to our support team to pass on to engineering. You'll also be updated with any progress.

You can now Annotate an attached file in a graded discussion but the student can't see it; this is on the above fix list. I hope it stays on for the instructor's capability and the students can see it eventually. However, right now with the download fixed you can annotate a Discussion attachment, download it, and attach it to your regular comment box in the graded Discussion. Works well, not as well as if the students could see it directly in Grades, but well enough and everything is contained in Canvas for a paper trail.

This list conveys the top known issues affecting the greatest amount of users. So there may be a few here and there that are not noted.

Support cases play a significant role in how tickets are prioritized, so if you haven't already, I'd encourage you to submit a support case so that our product team knows this behavior is affecting you.

Attachments can now be done with this new inline grader I am presently grading a series of papers with it now. But could be better if the students had the View Feedback link in Grades like a regular Assignment does.

In addition to chiming in about the garbage can icon, which several of my colleagues are also complaining about, I'd like to put something else out here for your consideration. I like very much the alternative of using media comments for students, but in this world we currently live in, we need closed captioning on these comments. I've had students who are more auditory learners really find these much more useful and intimate in teaching online classes particularly, but the closed captioning is a must-have for our students with hearing impairments (and I've had a fair number of such students).

As you work to improve Canvas features related to grading, please keep in mind that the fewer the number of clicks, the happier teachers will be. I teach English, and typically have 3-4 sections per quarter, many online. During paper load times, my carpal tunnel is screaming, which accentuates the need to delete icons that are not pushing the review process forward or helping to facilitate it.

Thank you for the feedback about creating more accessible feedback. We have plans to make DocViewer more accessible than any other annotation tool on the market. However, we would like to first make sure we have delighted our customers with the basic DocViewer features. We have a little ways to go on that front. But eventually, we will begin work on making our annotation tools more accessible for more folks. Thanks!

Thank you Christi Wruck, glad to hear that accessibility is on your road map. Would you be willing to share what accessibility work has been done already or what parts of the DocViewer experience are or are not accessible?

We originally outlined the existing state of DocViewer for accessibility in Canvas Release: Canvas DocViewer, and in those comments there are a couple of related feature ideas you may be interested to view as well. As always we'll continue to post additional updates as available in the Canvas release notes.

I'm sorry, but your whole system for providing feedback and commenting and suggesting ideas is much too complicated. After opening an idea in "Canvas Studio," I was given the opposite advice: I was told that my suggestion was already part of the plan and should be placed here.

It has been great to hear about the consideration of accessibility with the DocViewer for annotations and comments. I have a question about the accessibility of the content itself. Can you share what DocViewer does to content to present it in DocViewer? It is converting eveverything to a PDF and then putting a text layer on top of it? Does it maintain accessibility semantics and other semantic features like headings and alt text?

Your aim, I think, was primarily to free Instructure from having to make licensing payments to Box. The disadvantage for Canvas users is that we're currently forced to use a doc viewer that has reduced functionality compared to what CrocoDoc offered.

I'm experiencing something within SpeedGrader, that is not explicitly listed above. I need to put it on someone's radar. (Maybe, you guys will so revamp everything, that this will also be resolved as a byproduct.)

- I create an assignment (as Instructor).

- I switch to Student View

- I upload an 8-page .pdf as a submission to that assignment

- I exit Student View

- I go to Grades

- I find that newly-submitted assignment in "Student, Test".

- I open the uploaded .pdf in SpeedGrader

- I click on the "highlight" icon on the mark-up panel of tools

- I try to click-n-drag over a sentence to highlight it... and...

The browser tab freezes.

Eventually, the tab dies/kills/terminates. I'm left with Chrome's generic message, "Aw, snap! Something went wrong while viewing this webpage."

It happened twice in very rapid succession. I had to close the tab, re-open a new tab, and re-enter Canvas.

That was in Chrome.

I repeated the test in Firefox. It failed, too. But, it wasn't terminal: It would TRY to highlight text for three or four seconds, then I would get an error pop-up saying, "There was an error saving this annotation." But, when I clicked "OK" to close the pop-up window, I was returned to the SpeedGrader tab, and could continue performing OTHER annotations... except "Strikeout", which would produce the same error. Also... oddity... I did eventually get one highlight to work, without producing an error. But, instead of highlighting a single bulleted item in a bulleted list, it selected and highlighted the entire bulleted list.

Sounds like if this doesn't get resolved here, Cliff, you would want to submit this issue to Instructure Support. In the meanwhile if this was happening at our institution I would be asking about the nature of the document submitted to the assignment:

Is it a large file storage-wise? (i.e. What is the size on disk in terms of MB?)

How did the PDF file originate? (i.e. what generated it? Scanned Image from print material? Saved/exported from MS Word, Photoshop/Illustrator?)

Is the text in the original PDF been optimized for optical character recognition so that the text in the PDF can be copy/pasted to other documents?

This is definitely behavior that should be submitted to Canvas Support. Our engineers have been working hard to resolve many of the behaviors that exist in DocViewer; this document only recognizes the most notable that are being addressed, which is why you won't see a full list here.

Comments left here are not reviewed by Canvas Support (and by extension, our DocViewer team). Support cases give our support team the proper information about your account they can use to troubleshoot and identify the behavior you're experiencing.

So when you find contrary behaviors and want to know if they are intended, please always submit a support case (just copy/paste everything you've included here). You'll get a much faster response and will also be notified when an update is available. Your institution should have a preferred method for submitting support cases, either through your institution's support department or to Canvas Support directly.

Is there an estimated date by which we'll have a viable replacement for Crocodoc? The new school year has started for many of us, we heavily depended on Crocodoc to annotate students' work, and now we only have at our disposal a document editor that really isn't up to the task. I also haven't seen any sort of apology from the folks at Instructure about releasing a software product before it was ready -- perhaps I missed it?

Hi Erin, In line with Marc's comment, having estimated dates or even general timeframes gives us the ability to make decisions on implementing work arounds for instructors with critical needs that aren't being met. For example, if we know that realistically this will not be fixed until December, we'd provide a work around solution to the instructor even if it's cumbersome to start something new. Whereas, if the estimated fix is within 2-4 weeks, we might not bother providing a work around that may take just as much time to learn and get comfortable with. At the very least, we could have a better discussion when supporting our faculty if we had some information to work from.

Full Screen Preview:You all gave us great screenshots and stories to illustrate the pain of the document not stretching to the full height of the document. We hear you, and we are working to make sure the document can be previewed easily.Done 7/17/17. Bonus: we're also working on a way to expand inline, so that the whole document can be seen in the context of an RCE in a course, without taking over the entire screen.

Maybe there are two ways to interpret this issue... but, I was demonstrating something just this afternoon to some peers. And, I am still not able to expand the preview of the document to full-screen.

To be clear... I am meaning... "When I am logged in as a student, reviewing the feedback on a submitted document, DocViewer opens my annotated document in a preview window that is maybe 60% the size of my actual monitor. I am unable to make that preview full-screen." (image below)

So, I am not quite sure it is appropriate to mark this item as "Done".

Our engineers are aware ofsome slower performance with specific document rendering. If you have an example where DocViewer is rendering slowly, please submit it to our support team. Support tickets are the best way to help us triage behaviors.

Annotated PowerPoints that were viewable online in the Box application are not viewable online in docviewer

Workarounds we came up with to add annotated PowerPoints to modules:

Save a PowerPoint as PDF before uploading to a module.

or

After uploading to the Files area of a course, right-click to copy the URL (link address). Then, add it to a module as an External URL (instead of a file). That forces downloading of the file rather than viewing online.

Each of the options requires a little more work than just uploading PPT's, though!

Will the Annotated PowerPoints become viewable in docviewer in the future? I must admit I understand moving from a third party tool to inhouse, but I sure wish docviewer had been more robust before being rolled out. With just two years or so under our belts with Canvas and the high acceptance rate, we really didn't need what is perceived to be a major set back in functionality highly desirable by faculty.

I talked to our product manager about this and she'll make sure we have an engineering ticket to resolve this behavior. We do apologize for the inconvenience and our team will work on this as quickly as we can.

We are having various problems with PowerPoints that we did not have with the Box Viewer. Faculty who upload PowerPoints with Japanese characters used to be able to have these display properly in the viewer, but now they have to direct students to download the powerpoint or the faculty have to export the PowerPoint to PDF and then upload to Canvas. Overall viewing of PowerPoints seems to be much slower to load and I keep hearing "but this same powerpoint worked fine last year".

Foreign characters should be resolving correctly now in documents. The team deployed a change yesterday that should help resolve that behavior. If you're still seeing problems with foreign characters, please let our support team know!

Ultimately, if PowerPoints aren't working for you, please let our Canvas support team know. Our teams cannot triage any behaviors through release notes comments. I've checked our engineering tickets and I don't see any that are currently open related to PowerPoint, so our engineers most likely don't know that this behavior is occurring. Our support team is happy to help!

Not sure if this was your intent or not but it is disheartening to hear that something that I think we all considered basic functionality with PPTs in the Box viewer is not only not working in the new DocViewer but you are basically indicating that it was never a feature that was being tracked to be working or not as the engineers have no idea that PPTs are not working as before. Was there not a simple checklist of functionality that you knew needed to be added to have parity? Would the engineers not know that a feature that existed before is in fact unimplemented in the new version? That implies the plan was just to build a viewer that showed some of the stuff we had before and hopefully we get lucky and cover the functions we had previously. How would the team not know a major requirement from the previous version is just flat out not working? If it was not tracked as a requirement, you would think a function regression test plan would have the requirement to test for the previous features to be working.

It has been very disappointing, as others have mentioned, that one of the flagship features of Canvas and one that it is easy to get instructors to like and be addicted to is now just sort of randomly supporting some features of the past and not only do we, the users and admins, not know which ones may or may not be included but we find out the engineering team doesn't even know that commonly used functions of the previous tool they are trying to replace are not there.

Thank you, Scott. Well said. This is a disturbing pattern of behavior where Instructure releases a replacement feature (DocViewer, Teacher app) without being too concerned about the important functionality that is taken away from users.

I just posted a Discussion about this, but the DocViewer arbitrarily changes font and formatting when rendering PDFs. This makes assessing formatting, something important for research writing classes that teach MLA/APA citations, Works Cited, etc, effectively useless unless I download each paper on my end. With hundreds of papers each semester, this means DocViewer adds more work than it alleviates, and I might as well not use Canvas for document/assignment submission at all.

As Cameron Mount has noted, this will be a significant issue for our instructors who have writing assignments with specific formatting or page length requirements. This is definitely a bug that needs to be fixed based on the examples shared in the linked article. I will be asking our faculty to report this to Canvas Support if/when they encounter it.

The font rendering behavior should be resolved. If you have existing documents that aren't rendering correctly, let our support team know and they can re-render them for you. But new documents should not be seeing changes in font.

I logged a ticket to this very thing, as well. Mine was not concerning MLA style, but graphs. The reports that were filed by students were in a Word document. This allows the instructor to check them against previous semester students' submissions easily. When they were converted, the equation was completely removed and the slope of the graph was skewed to a flat line. That detrimentally changes the student's submission. If the instructor has them submit PDFs, she loses the process of checking against previous trimesters. If she has them upload Word documents, she has to download all the files to be able to grade.

We have also had trouble with the point comments still not deleting. I noticed the list shows that it had been added/fixed, but we are still having an issue with it. I'll log another ticket.

We apologize that there is still a behavior with equations not displaying correctly in .doc/.docx documents; that behavior was not resolved directly with the font update. Our team is working to address equations, so if you do file a case with Canvas support, you'll receive updates as soon as any are made available.

Instructors are reporting formatting and font issues in the document viewer in our Canvas environment as well. Another issue is that the document viewer inserts empty space into the pages not found in the uploaded paper. The formatting problem requires instructors to download student papers to verify if the issue is seen in the work uploaded by a student. This will greatly increase the time to grade online assignments.

Instructors have also reported that they have to repeatedly refresh a page if they want to highlight multiple sections.

We opened a ticket and are hoping that a solution can be provided soon.

We have also had many formatting problems requiring instructors to download submissions. Our issues deal with lab reports with tables, graphs, and equations not rendering at all or being placed in weird locations.

We're sorry you're having trouble! Our team is still working on resolving behaviors such as you've described, and exact cases are definitely helpful. If you haven't already, let our support team know (or your local support team) with the files you are trying to render, and our support agents can keep you posted with updates to those fixes just as soon as they are available.

As a point of information I just submitted case ****645 to Canvas support regarding DocViewer preview of a submitted Word assignment. The page layout does not render correctly in DocViewer including the downloaded annotated PDF. (A regular Word to PDF of the original submissions renders fine.)

If the teacher required the students to submitted their papers that consisted of APA or MLA formation, teacher should advice their students to save their digital/ online papers as PDF file format to avoid any disorder of text or layout issues.

I agree with this. Word is not just *a* standard format, but *the* standard format for documents, and forcing people to use PDFs introduces a whole series of issues, from the fact that it requires an extra step that instructors would now need to support, or the fact while there are PDF standards, the particular way a student or a program chooses to save the document may be different (some programs save it with no OCR recognition, for example, which doesn't work well in SpeedGrader). I find it troubling that this was released without full support for MS Docs, and I know we are not alone!

Canvas confirmed that DocViewer layout issues with submitted Word documents were fixed on October 10. Any submitted documents previous to the October 10 date would have to be identified and fixed by Instructure support staff through a manual resync.

A faculty member who uses Speedgrader extensively indicated that the "OK/Trash" feature for annotations has changed in the past few days. Currently, the tool appears to the upper left of the annotation, whereas it did appear to the lower left. That might not sound like a big deal, but depending on how you write and which paw you use, it can be very difficult. Is anyone aware of such a change? He wants it changed back if there is such an option.

We just updated that icon change in Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-09-25). We had received significant feedback related to the original placement of the icon because it obscured the added content/annotation, so the icon was moved above the annotation. This is just another small change being made to annotation tools. Ultimately our team will make the Delete icon only appear if it's clicked deliberately. We don't want it to be in the way of anyone when the icon isn't wanted.

Hi Christi Wruck - Excel is not listed under Supported File Types in Canvas Release: Canvas DocViewer. Is that still correct? I uploaded a test Excel file and it was viewable and I could annotate in DocViewer. I can't tell if using Excel file uploads will cause any SpeedGrader viewing/annotating issues in a course.

I'm not sure where to post issues with DocViewer any more since the threads keep closing. So, here's the latest from a faculty. We've been plagued with these issues. These are math faculty using a Wacom tablet to do markup:

"As you know, after you have finished writing something an icon appears with a check box and a trash can. If you want the note to be retained you click on the check box. If you want to trash it you click on the trash can. Because of the change that they made a couple of weeks ago, this icon often appears exactly where you want to write and it is really annoying. This is not new.

The new thing is that, when you click on the check box, some of your writing disappears! Most often it is markings that are straight lines—particularly vertical ones. So if you have written a t the vertical line will disappear leaving only the cross part. Also, dots often disappear. So if I have written 0.2, when I click on the check box, the decimal point will disappear and it will become 0 2.

I noticed another curious thing yesterday. I would start grading and the behavior of Speedgrader would start to deteriorate. For example, it would noticeably slow down in the sense that I would make a mark and then it would take a second or two before it would appear. I was using it with Firefox so I opened it up in Chrome and it perked up! I was able to grade in Chrome for a while before it started to deteriorate again. Then I went back to Firefox and it again worked better. This is really weird. I thought that it might have something to do with the cache so I started clearing the cache to see if it would help. I am not sure if it did. So that has been my current strategy. I go back and forth between browsers. It might help if I could understand a little bit why it is exhibiting this behavior."

The intent of this document is to update everyone about the team's progress with the nine issues originally noted. It's not to be a running list of every DocViewer update in progress (that's what the release notes are for) .

We do appreciate your concern with existing issues (as they're our concern, too!) but I am not able to discern if you are just noting behaviors generally, or if you are aiming to get help directly in these threads. Any discussion related to contrary behavior should always be submitted to Canvas support as a support case. Our support team is more than willing to help you out and look into why a behavior may be happening, and you'll also get a much faster and direct response.

Well, I intended to update a response on "Canvas Release: Canvas Doc Viewer", but that thread closed. These are general observations and frustrations we are experiencing. I would prefer to see if others are experiencing these same issues rather than submit a ticket.

The release document was never intended to be a living document to note all updated changes—it was just to introduce the feature itself. Additionally, our community platform does not support threaded conversations after 100 replies, so we encourage release notes comments to be timely and focused on the specificelements of each release. We do apologize that you're frustrated and our teams are doing everything they can to resolve concerns as soon as they are able.

The Find Answers space would be a more appropriate location for general ongoing discussions about Canvas features, best practices, and the like.

Can Docviewer be an option for any document opened within Canvas? We would like students to be able to annotate and highlight on other documents e.g. for flipped lessons with rubrics,but I can't find this functionality anywhere and can't find mention of it clearly in any beta release notes or documents since then.

As I read it, Erin Hallmark's answer, while accurate, doesn't address the question Gwenny Warnick raised, which I think was about students being able to use annotation tools: "We would like students to be able to annotate and highlight on other documents." As far as I know, there isn't any situation, even when doing Peer Review that students have access to annotation tools. This isn't a criticism, or a feature request (though come to think of it, it would be nice if students could use DocViewer annotations when doing Peer reviews). If there is already a way for peer reviewers to annotate what they review in Canvas, or to use DocViewer annotation tools anywhere in Canvas, I'd like to be able to add that to my Canvas knowledge.)

Thanks to everyone who has participated in this discussion. As Erin Hallmark noted in the thread, the purpose of this document was to introduce the new feature. When you find contrary behaviors and want to know if they are intended, pleasealwayssubmit a support case; you'll get a much faster response and will also be notified when an update is available.If you wish to submit additional feedback, please review the Canvas Community Feedback Guidelines to select the appropriate course of action.